Obasanjo’s Frustrations (2)

 By Ben Nanaghan

One of the greatest attributes of cabals is their ability to exploit weakness in governments and strengthen their own domination and influence on such governments. Cabals operate by a networking system which though beam attention on the leaders but work through a myriad of faceless rank-and-file foot soldiers who infiltrate and permeate the government-in-power for proactive information to checkmate and stifle government policies and programmes.

Apart from installing friendly governments to protect his stupendous wealth, Gen. Oulsegun Obasanjo also has a psychological inferiority complex which he has fought throughout his life. Obasanjo in terms of education is the least of them all and he flaunts his “double” presidential profile on the faces of would-be presidential candidates from the Southwest. It’s like saying “I did not obtain a formal university degree, but see what I have achieved”. He denied Chief Awolowo the presidency because Chief Awolowo had an impeccable antecedent  and performance record in the then Western Region with so many firsts-in-Africa in the spheres of education, health, sports, media, communication, agriculture, poverty alleviation etc. Obasanjo ensured that Chief Obafemi Awolowo never fulfilled his ambition of ruling Nigeria because of personal and egotistic considerations. This wicked “stroke” from Obasanjo accelerated the demise of Nigeria’s first avatar and icon who Chief Odumegwu Ojukwu satirically referred to as the “best president Nigeria never had”.

And even when Chief MKO Abiola with a landslide victory won the June 12, 1993 Presidential election, it was Obasanjo and his partner in crime, Gen. Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida that controversially cancelled the freest and fairest election in Nigeria’s political history. And when MKO Abiola walked up to claim his presidential mandate, he was immediately arrested and killed – the military way. Gen. Obasanjo pooh poohed Chief Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola and threw him into the dustbin of history with these immorally regrettable words, “Abiola is not the Messiah we are expecting”. Gen. Obasanjo will never support a South Western President  in his life time. It’s like repeating our traditional cliché of saying “over my dead body”.

OBJ also accused President Jonathan of ethnic factionalism and of being propped up by the Ijaw Nation. If anybody is imbued and guilty of ethnic factionalism Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo is the most likely candidate in Nigeria of today. When Gen. Obasanjo became president in May 1999, he was like a man possessed with a mission to straighten some crooked paths, to right so many wrongs. He came with a burning desire to amend certain institutions that were structurally, politically and socially skewed.

OBJ’s first port of call was the Nigeria Police Force which had few Inspectors-General from the southwest. Most Police Inspectors-General have always come from the North. Before then Louis Edet was the only non-Northerner. OBJ was rightly infuriated with this monopoly and replaced it with another Southwest monopoly. Immediately starting with his brother-in-law Musiliu Smith, the baton of exchange ran through Tafa Balogun to Ehindero at the end of his Presidency in 2007. But as at today the Nigeria Police Force has reverted to the status quo but this time with the I.G and about 90% of the police top hierarchy coming from the North. This situation applies to the Nigeria Customs Service also.

Gen. Obasanjo has no moral justification whatsoever to accuse President Goodluck Jonathan of ethnic factionalism because GEJ is so far the only non-tribalist leader Nigeria has ever had. OBJ introduced aristocratic democracy in Nigeria by picking his ministers, ambassadors and Aides, from well established and bourgeois political families from the South Western states. The Awolowo, Akintola, Adesanya, Fani-Kayode families were all favoured in this elitist and bourgeois form of democracy. As for Ms Tokunboh Awolowo’s choice, it was like killing the father and sparing the child.

In contrast to Obasanjo’s selective justice I do not know of any Ijaw minister presently in the Jonathan cabinet apart from Mrs. Dieziani and Mr Nysom Wike who is acting minister of education. President Jonathan’s Chief of Staff is a Bini man from Edo State and his media men including those of the first lady are all from the Southwest. His ADC is from Kogi State. When OBJ was President his kitchen cabinet and personal aides were mostly members of the Egbe Omo Oduduwa clan. But with President Jonathan I am told it will be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for an Ijaw man to enter Aso Rock.

Obasanjo’s reference to the Ijaw nation in inverted comas is to say the least derogatory, supercilious and in bad faith. Do the Ijaws not qualify to be referred to as a nation?

Just like the Yoruba nation, the Ijaws also qualify to be called an ethnic nationality because the Ijaws also are a group of people sharing the same culture, language and history, living together in designated areas!

Your heinous and damning decimation of the PDP National Vice chairman, Prince Buruji Kashamu is not only very unfortunate but very regrettable. I will not dwell much on this because Prince Kashamu himself has spoken. And this is what the Prince said: “I was one of his (Obasanjo) foot soldiers and partners. We planned and executed many things together. When it was convenient for him, I was his right hand. I teamed up with him against former Gov. Gbenga Daniel; fought the latter to a stand still”. You cannot deny the fact that Prince Kashamu was your political son who did so many things for you including odd and unprintable assignments.

Prince Kashamu also confirmed that your breakfast trips to Aso Rock were always for one favour or the other especially for GEJ’s intervention to breach the Rule of Law which GEJ always turned down.

In your letter to GEJ you said, “but like a good father, all I seek is peaceful and amicable solution”. By now the whole world knows that you are not a good father as copiously demonstrated by your satanic wickedness to your son Gebnga whose wife you lured away. And your beautiful daughter Iyabo who called you such names as stupid, your madness, great pretender, petty, liar, imbecile has summed up all I have to say about your being a good father. You are neither a good father nor a good husband, not even a good human being. Your daughter who knows you so well has said it all.

After reading through all Prince Buruji Kashamu and your daughter, Dr.Iyabo Obasanjo said about you, I decided to end my letter because there is not much to say again. Let Nigerians believe what they will but I know that all your accusations of 1000 names of politicians on a watch list, a federal government killer strike force, a bleeding nation, national bloodshed, a nation adrift, ethnic factionalism, drug baron, etc are all a figment of your heat-oppressed brain which is consistently creating evil which will eventually engulf you and your demonic machinators.

The National Assembly should call Obasanjo to substantiate his claims or face the music. If you were the sitting President and you got such a letter from a former ruler, you would have done so many things to him even before the letter got published.

Nigeria will surely survive without the services of a National Kingmaker, a CEO, a Mr. Nigeria as no single Nigerian or group of military generals have the right to stop President Goodluck Jonathan from doing his constitutionally guaranteed 2nd term.

OBJ’s 8 years tenure was an era of duplicitous impunity, trampling on the fundamental human rights of Nigerians and subjecting governance to malleable parameters and idiosyncracies. Obasanjo ruled like the Roman Emperor and Europe’s benevolent despots of the 19th century and overtly told his ministers and aides that they could advise him but he was not obliged to take their advice.

Unlike OBJ, President Goodluck Jonathan does not have that killer instinct which has been rightly identified with OBJ’s military background. GEJ has said it several times that his election as president was not worth the “spilling the blood of any Nigerian”. President Jonathan’s antecedents and natural humility have catapulted him far away from the bloody hands of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. GEJ’s tenure has not recorded any political killing as against unsolved major political murders during OBJ’s tenure. Chief Abiye Sekibo, Marshal Harry and our former Minister for power-Chief Bola Ige were among the high profile and other political murders recorded during OBJ’s tenure.

In my yet unpublished book “Goodluck Jonathan: The challenges of a minority president,” I paid glowing tributes to OBJ actualizing the unimaginable dream of a South South president beyond the manipulations and contemplations of Nigeria’s founding fathers.

But OBJ shot himself in the foot by playing God, by his narcissism and by his regular Oliver Twist trips to Aso Rock always asking for the impossible.

OBJ’s perfectly sanctimonious and self righteousness is an attempt to hoodwink unsuspecting Nigerians and to incite them into spontaneous mob action against GEJ.

But “God, who never sleeps” has raised someone from Obasanjo’s bowel to destroy him spiritually, psychologically, socially and politically so that President Goodluck Jonathan can carry on with his God-sent assignment despite Boko Haram and despite all the military cabals who want Nigeria to flounder because it pays them so.

•Concluded.

Nanaghan wrote from Lagos.

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